Luxury is getting a new look and it’s more than putting a logo on a sweatshirt | Canada Voices

Absolutely Fabrics, the designer and vintage retailer, recently played host to a dinner for three independent designers from New York whose brands were new to the Toronto shop: Rachel Scott of Diotima, Christopher John Rogers of his namesake line and Henry Zankov of his cult knitwear brand Zankov. Before cocktail hour, I asked Scott a question that generates countless headlines, but few concrete answers: What is luxury in fashion today? Is it a $910 quarter-zip fleece? A $20,000 Hermès Birkin?

“For me, craft and savoir-faire are really the true meaning of luxury, regardless of where they come from,” she says. “Things that are made beautifully by hand.”

Scott works with artisans in her native Jamaica to hand-crochet and embellish the pieces in Diotima. In October, after just three years in business, Scott won the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Award for American Womenswear Designer of the Year, the biggest award in American fashion, beating out fashion heavyweights including Marc Jacobs, Thom Browne and Tory Burch.

Scott specializes in Jamaican crochet and macramé, which she says are undervalued crafts compared with the work of vaunted ateliers of houses such as Chanel and Balenciaga. And with Diotima, she is challenging the perception that luxury is the exclusive domain of European fashion. “I actually don’t even know if Europe originated the idea of savoir-faire, or if they just capitalized on it,” she says. “But Europe has been very good at saying that their fashion is the most luxurious.”

However, designers such as Scott working outside the European capitals are more free to make up their own rules, to define luxury in their own image. “I think we can be a bit more radical, a bit more subversive,” she says.

Over the past two decades, the fashion industry has become synonymous with luxury, exploding from a niche business mostly of independent designers to a billion-dollar industry dominated by global luxury brands. The industry has consolidated to the point that the market is controlled largely by two French conglomerates: Kering, the parent company to Gucci, Balenciaga and Saint Laurent and LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate that owns brands including Louis Vuitton, Loewe and Dior. Some analysts liken the scale of fashion, an industry that once prized creativity as much as commerce, to a well-oiled machine pumping out generic logo-laden clothes at the same rate as soap – for about 500 times the price.

Independent designers struggle to compete with these brands’ seemingly limitless resources for everything from manufacturing to marketing. But designers such as Scott, Rogers and Zankov are earning industry recognition (and gaining real momentum at retail), proving that independent designers can succeed outside the gilded European ateliers.

Retailers such as Absolutely Fabrics are important partners for these designers. Free of the growth targets set by merchandising and buying teams, they can curate based on taste and instinct to help fledgling brands reach a specific but savvy consumer. Founder Kaelen Haworth sees her customers buying thousand-dollar pieces from designers they’ve never heard of – a rarity in a landscape where luxury brands are opening their own stores in every shopping district the world over. “That says a lot about that designer and the clothes they’re making,” she says.

For Zankov, luxury is a dirty word. “I feel like it’s been tainted with so many preconceived ideas of what it is, but I don’t know what the word is to replace it,” says the designer, whose intricate knitwear won him the 2024 CFDA for Emerging Designer of the Year. For him, luxury is longevity. “I always want to make sure that quality is at the forefront of anything I do,” he says. “You know, there’s quality in design, in longevity, in the product that you’re creating, where you want it to withstand the test of time.”

Rogers is franker in his assessment of luxury. “It’s boring,” says the award-winning designer. Known for his buoyant, vivid patterns that are a nod to his roots in Louisiana, Rogers’s namesake line has collaborated with J.Crew and Target. As a designer, he is far more motivated to explore how clothes can be a tool of self-expression than subscribe to a dated notion of luxury. “I’m doing my thing,” he tells me. “It’s so much more informed by where I live and who I hang out with, what I want to wear, what I need to wear.”

The global luxury market may be slowing down, but between industry accolades, a growing number of stores, collaborations and prestige press, these designers are thriving. Perhaps they’re unenthused about “redefining luxury” because they’re not interested in traditional notions of luxury, as a concept or an industry.

Between the churn of social media “cores,” the growth of ultrafast fashion behemoths including Shein and e-commerce programming us to shop anywhere, any time, very few of us abide by the Instagram adage of “buy less, buy better.” And yes, designer clothes are expensive: a dress from these three brands hover around the $1,500 mark, give or take a few hundred on either side. But many, many people buy them.

These designers prize creativity, design and craft – the very qualities we most associate with luxury fashion, but that are missing today from behemoth brands. This crop of designers doesn’t aspire to create a fashion fantasy or museum pieces that live (and die) in some wealthy collector’s archive. Rather, they make interesting clothes for real life: to wear to work, to dinner, to a wedding; clothes to cherish and pass down. That’s not luxury – that’s fashion.